How to Win the Olympic Games with a Brilliant Presentation? Part #1

The International Olympic Committee awarded Tokyo the 2020 Summer Olympics after a 45-minute presentation that wowed the voting members.

Let’s see what happened during these 45 minutes!

It was Nick Varley, a London-based consultant, who produced the Tokyo event. He said that his biggest challenge was to take the Japanese speakers out of their comfort zone and to present in the “western style.” After many famous presenters and professional speakers the Tokyo 2020 Olympics bid is the one of the finest team presentations they've ever seen.
Here are seven reasons behind its success; seven principles that you can use to turn your own presentations into an Olympic caliber pitch.

Build wow moments!

Inspiring presentations always have what we call a “holy smokes” or “wow moment” - a surprising, often unexpected, moment that elicits an emotional response from the audience.

The IOC was expecting a “traditional” (formal) presentation from Japan. Instead the presentation opened with the bright, smiling face of paralympian Mami Soto who told the story of losing her leg to cancer at 19 years of age. After, she attended a university, took up track and field and became an Olympian.

“I am here because I was saved by sport,” Soto told the audience.

According to Varley “a traditional Olympic pitch and Japanese culture would have suggested early speaking roles for senior leaders, such as the governor and prime minister. The audience expected a bit of a formal pitch, but we were determined to break that stereotype. From the moment Mami came to the podium, it was clear that this was not going to be a traditional presentation.”

Show video and photographs!

We’re living in a multimedia age where 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Inspiring presentations also contain multimedia elements, including images and video. A traditional, formal, PowerPoint presentation would have had many words on the slides.

Instead, all of the slides that accompanied Mami Soto’s first five minutes of the presentation had photographs on them, some showing Soto competing in track and field events with her prosthetic leg. Videos also played an important role. The Tokyo presentation included four slick videos that combined music, images, and young athletes in moving scenes.

“This was quite different than a standard presentation deck in Japan. We advised that with a multi-lingual, multi-national audience, the slides should be visual illustrations of the words.”

Obey the 10-minute rule!

Researchers have found that our minds begin to wander after ten minutes. So we would recommend that presentations have ‘soft breaks’ every ten minutes or less to give the mind a rest, to re-engage the audience, and to keep them stimulated. The Tokyo presentation did just that. In a 45-minute presentation, seven speakers took the stage. Along with the four videos, it meant that the audience did not hear from one voice for more than three or four minutes.

Be continued...